Teaching assistants:
Jan Eckardt (jeckardt@uwo.ca) Office hours: Monday 1-2pm or by appointment in SSC 7328
HugoMachado(hmachad2@uwo.ca) Office hours: Wednesday 2-3pm or by appointment in SSC 7332
Hayl Hasan Hayl Al-Salehi (halsale3@uwo.ca) Office hours: Thursday 11:30-12:30pm or by appointment in SSC 732
Course description
This course introduces students to basic concepts and methods of research in the social sciences and, in particular, in political science. Students will learn about how the scientific method of research can be applied to the study of human behaviour, adopting both qualitative or quantitative methods of analysis. In the first part of the course, students will learn about how to identify research questions and conduct literature reviews. In this same section, we will discuss questions related to research ethics and how such concerns can affect the kinds of questions one can ask and how other questions can be answered empirically. Next, we will discuss questions related to argumentation. These include defining clear concepts of interest and proposing strong arguments for building theories that will subsequently be evaluated with data. The following section covers how researchers go about choosing among methods of analysis and how cases are selected to adequately evaluate their research questions. Finally, the course will cover a series of commonly used qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, including interviews, focus groups, surveys, and experiments
Required course text
Brancati, D. 2018. Social Scientific Research. Sage. (hereafter Brancati)
Course objectives
Explain the goals, subjects, and orientation of social science research; identify the steps in the scientific method;
Present the ethical concerns surrounding the use of human subjects; detail the ethical issues regarding publication like transparency, credit stealing and others;
Introduce criteria for identifying a good research topic; identify ways research can make theoretical and empirical contributions; suggest ways to find inspiration for research;
Describe the purpose and content of a literature review; discuss how to summarize and synthesize research for a literature review;
Define concepts and their importance to research; describe the steps involved in building effective concepts;
Differentiate between deductive and inductive reasoning; define necessary, sufficient, and (neither) necessary and (nor) sufficient conditions; examine different directions through which explanatory factors influence outcomes; identify common mistakes in causal arguments;
Describe the attributes of qualitative and quantitative research; define hypothesis building, hypothesis testing, causal inference, generalizability, and replicability;